PVH is a new mode for a PV guest that runs in an HVM container. It significantly reduces the number of PV OPS required for PV guest. It allows for native syscalls performance. The MMU is greatly simplified via HAP. Overall, it should combine the best of both PV and HVM guests.

The audience is anyone interested in running Linux guests on the Xen Project hypervisor.

PVH overcomes many hurdles of a 64bit PV guest, like giving baremetal syscall performance, no qemu emulation required, etc. Thus it combines the best of PV and HVM guests.